On a train north, a little after the second stop, the young woman across the table put down her coffee, leaned in and asked, "Sorry, can I ask what you're wearing? I can only smell it when you turn a page."
I'll tell you what I said at the end. First, the reason she asked, because it is the whole answer to how to smell expensive. You smell expensive when your scent is discovered rather than announced. Wear less than you think, closer to the skin than you'd dare, and the same one for years. Someone should find it at the distance of a greeting, not across a restaurant. The same principle governs everything else that makes a noise about you: your voice, your handbag, your laugh, your phone. I wrote it down as a house rule:
"Never the loudest thing in the room. Not your voice, not your perfume, not your handbag."
What follows is a catalogue of volume, in no strict order. Some entries are a sentence. Some needed a paragraph.
How to smell expensive, entry by entry
Amount
Two points of skin. The inside of the wrists, or the base of the throat, or behind the ears if you prefer. Not a spray into the air that you then walk through like a bride under confetti. You stop noticing your own scent within the hour, which is why people keep adding more. Trust the first application. Everyone else can still smell it.
Arm's length
This is the test I use. If someone notices your scent when they lean in to kiss your cheek, you've got it right. If they notice it when you come through the door, you've said too much before hello.
Courage, perfume as
I learnt this one the hard way, and I've never quite stopped blushing about it. In my thirties I had a meeting I was frightened of, with a man whose good opinion my small firm needed rather badly. On the way I stopped at a department store counter, bought something heavy and gold-coloured that the assistant called "a statement", and sprayed it four times in the ladies' room for courage. It was February. Ten minutes into the meeting he got up, quite casually, and opened the window. He was far too polite to say a word. The window said it for him. I went home and gave the bottle to a friend who liked that sort of thing, and I have never since tried to borrow confidence from a bottle.
Drawer, scent the
My grandmother, who was a dressmaker, kept cedar blocks in the bottom of the wardrobe and a sachet of dried lavender in the drawer with her good gloves. Her clients smelled faintly of something pleasant and nobody could have told you what. Scent the drawer and let the clothes carry it to you. It is the most discreet perfume there is.
Everyday clean
Most of what people mean by "smells expensive" is simply clean. Freshly washed hair. A shirt that has been properly laundered and ironed, not sprayed with something to cover the second day. Wool that has been aired on a hanger overnight instead of stuffed into the back of a cupboard. No smoke, no fried breakfast in the fibres of your coat. Get that right and you barely need perfume at all.
Friend, telling a
Sooner or later someone you love will wear far too much, and nobody else will tell them. Do it privately, once, and start with the compliment, because it's usually true: "Can I say something only a friend would? That scent is lovely on you, and you're wearing about twice as much as you need." Then change the subject and never mention it again. If they're cross, they'll be cross for a day. If you say nothing, they'll be Tuberose for years. (You'll meet Tuberose in a moment.)
Gifts
Perfume is a lovely present for someone whose scent you already know, a refill of the thing they wear. For anyone else it is a guess about their skin, and a slightly intimate one. Give them good soap instead, or a candle for the hall, and let them choose what they put on their own neck.
Hotel lobby
When I was twenty-nine and still polishing the hotel's brass bell every morning with a rag that smelled of metal polish, there was a guest who stayed with us every autumn. Her perfume reached the counter about three seconds before she did, and it stayed in the lobby for an hour after she'd gone up. She was generous and good company and I liked her. The staff called her, without malice, "Tuberose". Not her name. Her perfume's. I remember deciding, bell in one hand and rag in the other, that whatever I became, I did not want to be remembered by my perfume's name.
Lift
Anything you wear, you'll share with nine strangers in a small metal box at eight in the morning. Dress for the lift, not the mirror.
Men
Exactly the same rules, and more often broken, because a great many men were handed a bottle of aftershave at sixteen and never told how much. Two points of skin. The same scent for years. Less at the table. A man who smells faintly of cedar and clean shirt when you shake his hand has done something most men in the room haven't bothered to do, and people register it without being able to say why.
Signature scent etiquette
Choose one and keep it. Not for ever, necessarily, but for years. A scent worn consistently becomes part of how people know you, the way a handwriting does. There is an entry in my grandmother's diary about a client who wore the same scent to every fitting for a decade: "When she has gone, it stays in the room a little while, like good manners." That's the whole ambition. A little while. Not all afternoon.
The rest of the etiquette is short. Apply before you dress, never in the lift or the car. If someone asks what it is, tell them its name gladly; there's nothing expensive about secrets. Never ask anyone to guess.
Table, at the
Wear less to dinner than to anything else, and less again if someone has cooked. Heavy scent sits over the food and the wine and fights both, and the hostess who spent all afternoon on the lamb deserves to have it smelled.
Zero, occasions for
Some days the most elegant amount is none. Hospitals and sickrooms. Small offices with the windows shut. A long flight. A job interview in a room the size of a cupboard. Anywhere with a new baby. Anywhere you don't know who might find it hard to bear. No one has ever been marked down for smelling of soap.
Sound: the volume nobody measures
Bracelets
I wear gold at my wrists and always have. But gold that clatters against a table every time you lift a glass is a small drum solo nobody asked for. I learnt to take off the second bangle before dinner.
Heels
On marble or old floorboards, a hard heel announces you down the whole corridor. Have them re-soled with something quieter, or walk more slowly. Slow is better anyway.
Laugh
Laugh freely. Please. But if heads turn three tables away, you've performed rather than laughed, and people can tell the difference.
Phone
Ringtone off in public. Always. No speakerphone anywhere other people are trying to exist. No videos played aloud on a train, and I say that with great affection for the young man who once let me hear an entire football match from the seat behind.
Voice
Lower than you think and slower than you'd like. A voice that carries across a restaurant is telling the whole room your business. The room will lean in to a quieter one; speaking with confidence is far more about pace than volume.
Understated style, from handbag to watch
Colour
One strong colour at a time, and let it be the thing people remember. A red lip, for instance. I'm not giving mine up. But a red lip, a red bag and red shoes is a traffic light. Subtraction is also the quiet engine of an outfit that looks expensive.
Handbag
A bag with a logo you could read from across the road is talking to strangers, and strangers are the only people it impresses. The women I most admired carried bags you couldn't identify at all until you held one and noticed the stitching, the way the handle had softened to the shape of one particular hand. The people with the most money are often the hardest to spot, for reasons laid out in why rich people dress plain.
Jewellery
One piece that moves. Earrings that swing, or a bracelet, or a necklace with some life to it. Choose one and keep the rest still.
Watch
The best watch in a room is usually the one you have to be told about. If yours gets mentioned before you do, it's too loud.
Quiet elegance when the room is watching
Entrance
Come in, stop for a breath inside the door, find the host. That's all. The quieter the arrival, the longer people look.
Home, your
The same volume rules apply to the hall your guests walk into. One candle lit an hour before they arrive, then blown out, is a welcome. A candle, a diffuser and something plugged into the wall all at once is a department store on a Saturday. Fresh flowers and an open window for ten minutes beat all three.
Opinions
The loudest thing in a room is very often not a sound but a certainty. You can hold a firm view without broadcasting it to all eight people at the table. Say it once, at conversational volume, and let it sit there.
Stories about money
What something cost, what you earn, where you've just been. All volume. None of it music.
Exit
Thank the host, find your coat, go. No lap of the room. Leave nothing behind you except a slightly pleasant impression and, if you've got the perfume right, a very faint trace of it in the hall.
Who reads to the end of a list of things to turn down
Here is what I notice about anyone who has read this far. You have just spent some time on a catalogue of things to do less of. Less scent, less clatter, less logo, less laugh. Most people stop reading lists like that at the third entry, because it sounds like being told off. You didn't. You were checking your own wrists and your own voice as you went, weren't you, and quietly deciding which bangle comes off.
That's the instinct, and it can't be taught; you either stop at the third entry or you don't. The rest is practice. Anyone who gets to the end of that list with their wrists in their lap is already more than halfway to being someone a room leans towards without quite knowing why.
The other half is what I made The Full House for. The part I'd point you to first is a single word on the journal's night page: Carriage. Before bed you give yourself a mark out of ten for how you held yourself that day, and nothing else. The loud days show up in that number with great honesty. The evening you laughed across three tables is a six. The dinner where you took the second bangle off before the soup, spoke at the pitch of the person beside you and left while the coffee was still hot is an eight, and you'll know exactly why. After a few weeks of marks you start turning yourself down a notch before you walk in, rather than wincing about it on the way home.
And the young woman on the train? I told her, "The same one for thirty years, and about half as much as you'd think."
